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About Francis Crawford

Francis Crawford Burkitt was a British theologian and scholar. He was Norris Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge, from 1905 until shortly before his death. Burkitt was a sturdy critic of the notion of a distinct "Caesarean Text" of the New Testament put forward by B. H. Streeter and others.
He was educated at Harrow School and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read mathematics, graduating B.A. as 28th Wrangler in 1886, and gained a first-class in the theological tripos in 1888.
Burkitt accompanied Robert Bensly, James Rendel Harris, and sisters Agnes and Margaret Smith on the 1893 expedition to Saint Catherine's Monastery, Mount Sinai to examine a Syriac palimpsest of the Gospels discovered there the previous year by the two sisters. Burkitt played an important role in deciphering the text, and in subsequent publication of the team's findings.
Burkitt was a noted figure at Cambridge in 1912–35 for his chairmanship of the Cambridge New Testament Seminar, attended by other prominent theologians, including Robert Newton Flew, who left an account of it in an obituary for Burkitt in the Proceedings of the British Academy.